


Venus Fly

by authorperson



Series: Philautia, or Self Love [3]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, MASH (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Angst, Character Study, Daemon Feels, F/M, M/M, PTSD, Slice of Life, running roughshod over HDM canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-25
Updated: 2018-01-25
Packaged: 2019-03-09 08:22:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13477503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/authorperson/pseuds/authorperson
Summary: Ansalie is a beautiful specimen, don’t get him wrong. Her eyes sparkle like the night sky and he loves her like nothing and no one else in the world. It’s just. Trap and Ansalie are not a good fit, as daemons go. She is everything that he is not.The life and times of Trapper John and Ansalie McIntyre, in eight steps.





	Venus Fly

**Author's Note:**

> "Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies."--Aristotle

Ansalie McIntyre is a beautiful specimen, don’t get him wrong. She is shy, retreating, watchful, cautious, sharp as a tack and deadly serious. She is meticulous, neat, put together, and when she does a thing it is always carefully done up in a bow, so complete that no one could find fault with it. She’s twice as good as he is at almost everything they do, but she’ll never let anyone say so, not even him. In looks, she’s a stunner, with a large black body, sleek like a great hairless tarantula and as big around as a salad plate, and delicate dancing legs, and the daintiest spinnerets you ever saw. Her eight eyes sparkle like the night sky and he loves her like nothing and no one else in the world.

It’s just.

Trap and Ansalie are not a good fit, as daemons go. She is everything that he is not.

They don’t settle in a rush, like most people. There’s no one moment they can point to and say, “that’s it, that was when we knew”. They settle like silt in a slow-moving stream, like the slippery slopes on both banks, like the slither and cinch of a snare trap. Like, and he hates the metaphor, hates that it springs straight to mind, hates most of all that it’s so apropos, like a spider hunting from the center of her web.

This is how it happens:

When Johnny’s ten and not called Trap, he goes on a three-week hunting trip with his Uncle Dave and his Uncle Dave’s Special Friend Jon and he comes back with a nickname, a side of moose with grapeshot in it, and a daemon they don’t yet know is settled.

It takes about four months to figure it out, actually. Nobody’s looking for a ten-year-old to be settled, and nobody’s looking for a ten-year-old like Johnny-who-his-Uncle-Dave-calls-Trap to be settled quite like _that_.

He’s just not the _type_ , for one thing. If anybody was ever born to be a mammal-daemon it is Johnny Andrew McIntyre. He’s a cuddly, affectionate boy, always helping out his ma or his sisters with the mending, or the young widow Ainslie with her chickens, or the nuns down the orphanage with the younger children. He learns to read Latin from his grandpappy’s medical books, and cries in his mother’s apron when the poor mauled cat he stitched back together doesn’t make it through the night, and there is never a doubt in anyone’s mind what he’ll do when he gets older.

And for another, he and his Ansalie are always so _close_ to each other, always thick as thieves, always joined at the hip. There’s not a thing he does that she doesn’t match him in stroke for stroke. When he helps with the mending, she’s a terrier, fetching each next torn shirt in careful teeth. When he helps with the chickens she joins them, plays the hen to round the real birds back into the safety of the coop. When he reads to the children, she follows the tale, shifting from valiant steed to feral wolf and back as the story demands of her. When they lose their first patient the cat, Ansa avoids her favored tortoiseshell form for two months, long enough for their mother to get worried and to call her brother David, and to ask him how to go about cheering a big-hearted boy who reminds her of him in too many ways.

And yet, four months home from that hunting trip which was David’s idea, which had seemed to work so well for all Johnny came back ebullient and sneaking around with a fire in his eyes and setting small pranks on his sisters, when it’s become clear through time and circumstance that Ansalie is still in the same strange form and hasn’t changed, not once, and is still not changing for love or money, come hell or high water, they’ve all got to accept it: sometime on that trip and somewhere in the hunt, when they were lying in wait in the backwoods of Pennsylvania, little Ansalie McIntyre slipped into the form of a large black spider and now she won’t ever come out.

Nobody is quite sure what to make of her, now, and it’s just Johnny’s luck and his good reputation that mean folks don’t change their perception of him when they change their opinion of her. Johnny’s daemon is a changeling child, but Johnny-who-his-sisters-call-Trap stays the same bright-eyed, intelligent, kind little creature that he’s always been. His parents sit him down to have the daemon talk full three years earlier than they ever thought they’d need to, and Ansalie watches with eight wide eyes from his breast pocket, but Johnnie takes it all in his stride. He sets to work to figure her out, and when their little encyclopedia isn’t sure what she is, beyond the was obvious, he hies himself to the library to go at it in good earnest. After three months, it’s clear that they’ll have no answers there either, and they ask their mother to take them down to the University to have an entomologist—it’s a new word, they learn it just for this—take a look at her.

They go with Uncle Dave again because their mother says that Ansa is Uncle Dave’s problem even though Uncle Dave says she’s not a problem at all, and also because Uncle Dave’s got a spare car and Uncle Dave’s Special Friend Jon works in the biology department, so they’ve got what Uncle Dave calls an ‘in’.

Uncle Dave’s Special Friend Jon meets them at the parking lot with a little glass box filled with dirt and dead leaves, and Ansalie runs down Johnny’s arm and takes a flying leap and slams the hinged lid shut behind her before Johnny can ask what it’s for.

“I thought she’d like that,” says Uncle Dave’s Special Friend Jon, handing the box to Johnny. Johnny raises the lid carefully, and Ansa’s eight glittering eyes glow back at him from beneath the leaf litter. “We’ve got real animals inside, Trap, just like when we were in the woods. Do you remember why you’ve got to be careful around animals?”

“Cuz they’re not people like daemons and they can’t tell us when they’re scared,” says Johnny dutifully. He scrunches his nose. “C’mon, Uncle Jon, I’m not some kid. I’m in the _fifth grade_.”

Uncle Jon makes a sound like he’s swallowed his tongue.

“That’s right,” says Uncle Dave in a weird voice, but he claps a hand on Johnny’s shoulder like normal anyway. “And some of them might think Ansa is food. Only now she can’t change to protect herself, so you’ve got to keep her safe. You got that?”

“Sure,” says Johnny, hugging the box tight. Ansa scuttles around the inside of her box, thumping against his hands until he turns the hinges toward himself so she can look out if she wants to. He’d like to see them try.

Uncle Jon leads them up a lot of stairs and into a big cold room with lots of wooden cabinets and black topped counters like six kitchens stuck together. There’s a man in here who Uncle Jon says is called Dr Gertsch, with grey hair and a lab coat on, and he’s got another few glass boxes with other spiders in them and a camera. He looks up at them when they come in. “Howdy, Jonathan,” he says. “Hello, David. This must be Trapper. And Ansalie? There you are, dear, I see you. Aren’t you a beauty. Come in, come in.”

It takes about four seconds for Dr Gertsch to tell him she’s a trapdoor spider, to judge by her reaction to her new box. It takes another four minutes for him to admit he can’t tell what species she is, and another four doctors coming in to see her to realize none of them have seen anything like her before. And then it takes another four hours, and as many photos and measurements as Trap and Ansa can stand before he’s happy enough with the data to let them go home.

It takes another four years for Dr Gertsch to find another like her, out in the back woods of Pennsylvania, for her to become the daemon-form type specimen of what he ends up calling _Ummidia funerea._

**Author's Note:**

> Ansalie is one of these beautiful little darlings, first described by Dr Willis Gertsch in 1936
> 
>  


End file.
